There was a high-pitched scream as the steam locomotive trundled to a halt in La Paz. The altitude was much higher than General Lister was used to. It very much felt like he was at the literal end the earth, where the heavens met the ground. He wondered how any of his Spanish countrymen had found this place habitable, but supposed that, panting, he'd probably get used to it in time. It did have some very nice aesthetics. The people spoke Spanish, too, admittedly of a fairly peculiar accent, but generally comprehensible with a bit of a work on his part. Why had Bolivia needed to embrace the revolution first? Of course Spain would be best, but it could have at least been Cuba, or Venezuela, or somewhere generally more civilized and flat and with clean, pretty Spanish dialect.

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None of that mattered much. He was here, officially, as a private citizen; unofficially, as an agent of the Soviet government leading his team of several dozen Spanish exiles, and nominally, the several hundred Spanish orphans who were presently supposed to be conducting a Soviet-sponsored literacy campaign [and a few miscellaneous Russian and German experts who were assigned to other tasks]. His task was defending the Bolivian Revolution. As Comrade Fredo said, "In every town, in every neighborhood, we must be constantly vigilant in our defense of the national revolution". Discussion as to the exact ideology of the "Bolivarian Revolution" absorbed a frustratingly large amount of time, but in the end the anti-Western nature of the Revolution [and particularly anti-American] along with elements certainly sympathetic to communism meant that their mission was clear. It wasn't as if Lister hadn't worked with even more dubious fellows against Franco back during the Civil War days.

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The result of the work of these Soviet advisors, in line with a few Bolivian intellectuals and Comrade Fredo himself, has been the development of the new national system of representative worker's democracy, the Autodefensas Unidas de la Revolución Bolivariana or simply "Autodefensas". The Autodefensas are a more granular, local and universal representation of the current crude form of government that are the worker, peasant and soldier's councils. Every barrio will be led by an Autodefensas, which will be responsible both for local government operations like trash collection and road maintenance, but will also be responsible for the defense, both civil and military, of the revolution. These elected councils [elections being subject, of course, to the judgement of the PRBI as to who is allowed to run] will lead local armed militias and be responsible for gathering informants and agents for the government.

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This Leninist system of local government will also require a new household registration system. Internal migration controls are not being adopted--even external migration controls are considered a bit daft in the Americas--but existing outside the realm of those registered with their local Autodefensas is asking for a precarious and fragile life.

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Separate from the Autodefensas and the new PRBI structure being built up around the country as the reflection of the people's guided democratic government on the road to socialist democracy, the Soviets have also helped the Grand National Revolutionary Junta on the first steps to the development of the oficina de estadísticas, the "Bureau of Statistics", nominally under the Ministry of the Interior and responsible for collection of national statistical data, but in reality the seed of what is hoped to be an intelligence agency rivaling any in the Eastern Bloc, or Western for that matter. At the moment the ODE's top priority is counter-intelligence against foreign imperialist spies and Bolivian exiles abroad.

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Finally, the National Police Corps has been renamed the National Revolutionary Police Corps. It has been detached from the army and placed under the Ministry of the Interior, and its revolutionary tendencies have been aggravated by careful promotions and the removal of some right-leaning members, especially those caught up in the Moscosco Affair. Various additional minor reforms, including the addition of PRBI political officers to the civilian police force and the placement of all police carabiner detachments directly under command have also taken place to ensure the reliability of the police force.